News blog

Cyberspace abuzz over putative NASA mission

Mars_mission.jpgHave you heard the one about the one-way manned mission to Mars? Many recent reports suggest that NASA and DARPA have come together in a plan for a “Hundred Year Starship” that would colonize distant worlds—starting with Mars—with each agency providing $100,000 and $1 million in funding, respectively.

The proposal was informally announced by Simon “Pete” Worden, director of NASA’s Ames Research Center, when he spoke at a Long Now Foundation event in San Francisco, California on 16 October. (Video here)

“The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds,” Worden is quoted as saying. “We also hope to inveigle some billionaires to form a Hundred Year Starship fund.”

Over the years, various plans of this sort have been made, including one published in the Journal of Cosmology 18 October. So then has the agency made steps toward this most science-fiction of goals?

“This is not a NASA program, there’s no money for it,” says Michael Braukus, a spokesman at NASA headquarters in Washington D.C.

But DARPA acknowledged the plan exists, though a press release from their spokesman, Eric Mazzacone, said it was “a year-long study” that “aims to develop a construct that will incentivize and facilitate private co-investment” for the endeavor.

Image: NASA

Comments

  1. Uncle Al said:

    1) Dentistry.

    2) Sanitary tissue.

    3) Diapers (nappies).

    4) Crimes of passion.

    5) Beards. A real man confronts his whiskers with a ball peen hammer and bites them off from the inside.

    6) Single malt scotch. To travel without would be inhumane.

  2. JohnStClair said:

    It takes less time to teleport across the galaxy than it does to walk across the street. By changing Planck’s constant with a lower light speed, it is possible to enfold an object into hyperspace and teleport it to another location. The other method, is to create a wormhole with negative energy and place one opening here on earth and the other on an elevator shaft on Mars. The elevator rises into the first wormhole opening, experiences some wavy space-time in the throat, and then emerges through the second opening in the Mars elevator shaft. Teleportation has already been achieved, so why aren’t we developing it?

  3. violinner said:

    Inhabitants would go mad from the indoors smell sooner or later.

    Report this comment Cancel report
    Your details

    Please confirm the words below

    In order to reduce spamming, this process ensures you are a real person and not an automated program.

Comments are closed.